Famine is a frightful thing to contemplate, not least because we have the ability to contemplate it. If you have not experienced war, the veteran informs us, you have no idea of the reality of combat. But everyone can imagine, by mentally inverting our ordinary experience, how unpleasant it is to be forced to go […]

IN The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that of the five classes of spies the most important is the “converted spy,” or double agent, because it is only through him (or her) that true “knowledge of the enemy” can be obtained. John le Carré writes that in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—perhaps the greatest literary representation of a counterespionage operation—he wanted to capture “the sheer scale of the mayhem that can be visited on an enemy service when its intelligence-gathering efforts fall under the control of its opponent.”

AMERICA IS A land of hardy individualists who overcame every obstacle, a country of restless spirits who cheerfully traversed the oceans, conquered the West, defended freedom, and invented the modern world. Right? No, that is not quite the whole of it, argues Susan J. Matt in her indispensable new book, which belongs on the shelf of […]

IT MUST BE TRUE that human culture has always lavished attention on “celebrities” who boast no readily identifiable talents. No doubt a few poseurs were immortalized in ancient cave drawings just because they knew how to draw attention to themselves. But modern American culture is hard to beat when it comes to the lionization of […]

IN A NEW YORK magazine article last spring, a young Chinese-American named Jefferson Mao spoke of the cultural importance of doing well on school exams. “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take,” he told Wesley Yang. Yang’s piece described how Chinese neighborhoods in Queens are filled with “‘cram schools,’ or storefront […]

THERE IS NO more tragic vegetable than the potato. Originating in the Peruvian Andes, it was first domesticated by the Quechua-speaking peoples, who could not help but become reliant on a highly nutritional foodstuff that could be grown in large quantities on small plots in regions inhospitable to grains. John Reader, in his ambling new […]

To the Irish, few things are more essential than the land. While perusing an oral history collection from the 1930s at University College, Dublin a few years ago, I was struck by how the most unremarkable field, some uninhabited spot tucked between two rural villages, would be described in deliciously precise detail and given its […]

John L. Sullivan, one of the most celebrated Americans of the nineteenth century, officially stepped into the ring for the final time on September 7, 1892. The flabby champion, a symbol of Gilded Age excesses, faced a fit San Franciscan with a perfect pompadour named James J. Corbett. “Gentleman Jim,” as he would eventually be […]

On Easter Monday in 1916, a tiny army of Irish separatists seized several buildings of middling significance in central Dublin, neglecting to take Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in the country, and ignoring communications outposts essential to any insurrection. With little popular support and no electoral mandate, they issued a proclamation declaring a […]

It’s easy to imagine how a novelist might use a real person as a basis for a fictional character. It’s equally easy to imagine how such a person could notice the similarities and perhaps become offended. After all, the fiction writer has pledged an oath to serve a calling higher than mere feelings. Why should […]

By Peter Duffy Few baseball fields can boast the history of the tattered diamond with the poured concrete grandstand in the northern reaches of Crotona Park in the Bronx. In the 1920s, Hank Greenberg, who became a Hall of Famer playing most of his career with the Detroit Tigers, would walk over from his home […]

By Peter Duffy In 1986, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in New York, Joe Reddick was an 18-year-old drug dealer fueled, he says, by “envy, jealousy and greed.” Known by the street name of Black, Mr. Reddick set up operations in a small apartment building at 1839 University Avenue in the Morris […]

By Peter Duffy Seventy-five years ago, in a small village in eastern Ukraine, Daria Schulha Kira recalls huddling with her three siblings as Communist Party officials ransacked their home looking for grain. “Your government needs your food,” she remembers the armed men shouting. “Then they took iron bars and poked in the walls and the […]

By Peter Duffy In the final moments of the gangster film “Little Caesar” (1931), Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello, mortally wounded by gunfire, utters his dying words: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” The critic Robert Warshow used this scene to argue that, in the gangster genre, the mobster’s “whole life is […]

By Peter Duffy Frank McCourt, who died on Sunday at age 78, was the most Catholic of authors. The rites and rituals of Ireland’s Catholic Church of the 1930s and ’40s exist at the core of “Angela’s Ashes” (1996), his great Bildungsroman. That book’s hilarious and irreverent chapter on Mr. McCourt’s preparation for, and eventual […]

By Peter Duffy For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, John McCandlish Phillips composed elegant newspaper stories under grueling deadline pressure for the New York Times, earning a reputation as one of his generation’s great reporters. In his 2003 memoirs, Arthur Gelb, a longtime editor at the paper, described him as “the most original […]

By Peter Duffy Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the 18th-century founder of modern Hasidism, was once asked why his followers worshipped in an ecstatic style full of singing and dancing. He responded by telling a parable about a street-corner fiddler who played with such skill that everyone who heard him began to jig. A deaf man, […]

The Irish Americans By Jay P. Dolan (Bloomsbury, 352 pages, $30) By Peter Duffy Irish people of Protestant affiliation first began settling in British America in significant numbers in the 1720s. By 1790 they represented a sixth of the population of the young United States. Such pioneers are impossible to extricate from the early history […]

By Peter Duffy Thomas D’Arcy McGee By David A. Wilson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 432 pages, $39.95) In the summer of 1848, during the worst days of the Great Irish Famine, a band of idealistic revolutionaries tried to spark the starving Irish people into rebelling against their cruel British overlords. But the writers, poets and orators […]

By Peter Duffy On this St. Patrick’s Day, Ireland is peaceful and prosperous. The animosities of the past will have little bearing on the great parade that travels up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The so-called Celtic Tiger, with its cubs more interested in the strength of the euro than the durability of sectarian differences, appears […]

By Peter Duffy The history of handball, the greatest of New York City street games, has not been written. Instead, its folk memory is passed on through the rich oral tradition of its glove- and eyegear-wearing practitioners. On the benches surrounding the Seaside Courts on Surf Avenue in Coney Island — handball’s holiest site — […]

How the bare-knuckle fighter John C. Heenan united the country before the Civil War. “Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against his shoulderblade. In Clohissey’s window a faded 1860 print of Heenan boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in […]

In reviewing William Easterly’s book on the failures of development aid, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Effort to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), Nobel laureate Amartya Sen wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The challenge is to respond to the plight of the hopelessly impoverished without neglecting […]

Kikuyus, Luos, and Kisii in Jersey City nervously watch events in Nairobi By Peter Duffy If you know where to look as you travel through Jersey City, you can spot the institutions of one of the most vital Kenyan communities in the United States. There’s the Mallory Coffee Shop, where Kenyans can order ugali, an […]